Showing posts with label asset value. Show all posts
Showing posts with label asset value. Show all posts

Tuesday 12 December 2017

Price is always an approximation; any precision is an illusion.

Price is a number that is often a delusion and nearly always a distraction.

The price attached to a stock or other financial asset changes in a frantic hum, often several thousand times a day, causing corrosive intellectual damage.

It may have little relation to VALUE, although it is more interesting and keeps most of the financial media quite busy.

The continual flux and spurious precision of price will cast an illusion of certainty, fooling many investors into thinking that the exact worth of a stock is knowable at any given moment.

That tricks investors into believing that even tiny changes in price can have great significance when, in fact, the constant twitching of stock prices is nothing but statistical noise.

Under the illusion of certainty created by PRICE, investors forget that VALUE is approximate and that it barely changes on even a monthly time scale.

Investors who fixate constantly on price will always end up trading too much and overreacting to other people's mood swings; only those who focus on ascertaining value will achieve superior returns in the long run.



Example:

If asked what your house is worth, would you respond, "$237,432.17?"  Of course not.

You know perfectly well that nobody, including you, knows what your house is worth to the nearest thousand dollars, let alone to the nearest penny or fraction of a penny. 

Instead, you would say, "Between $200,000 and $250,000 maybe."



With stocks and other financial assets, price is also an approximation; any precision is an illusion.

Saturday 29 April 2017

Asset-Based Valuation

Asset-Based Valuation uses market values of a company's assets and liabilities to determine the value of the company as a whole.

Asset based valuation works well for:

  • Companies that do not have a significant number of intangible or "off-the-book" assets, and have a higher proportion of current assets and liabilities.
  • Private companies, especially if applied together with multiplier models.
  • Financial companies, natural resource companies and companies that are been liquidated.



Asset-based valuation may not be appropriate when:

  • Market values of assets and liabilities cannot be easily determined.
  • The company has a significant amount of intangible assets.
  • Asset values are difficult to determine (e.g., in periods of very high inflation).
  • Market values of assets and liabilities significantly differ from their carrying values.

Thursday 9 October 2014

Asset value (AV) and Earnings power value (EPV). Know the 3 scenarios - AV > EPV, AV = EPV and AV < EPV

What you have got then is two pictures of value: 

1. You have got an asset value
 2. You have got an earnings power value
 
And now you are ready to do a serious analysis of value. If the picture looks like case A (AV > EPV), what is going on assuming, you have done the right valuation here? If it is an industry in decline, make sure you haven’t done a reproduction value when you should be doing a liquidation value.  What it means is say you have $4 billion in assets here that is producing an equivalent earnings power value of $2 billion. What is going there if that in the situation you see?  It has got to be bad management.  Management is using those assets in a way that can not generate a comparable level of distributable earnings.  

AV is Greater Than EPV 
  • In this case the critical issue—it would be nice if you could buy the company—but typically you pay the reduced EPV and all that AV is sitting there.
  • Then you are going to be spending your time reading the proxies and concentrating on the stability or hopefully the lack of stability of management. 
  • Preeminently in that situation, the issue is a management issue. 
  • The nice thing about the valuation approach is that it tells you the current cost that management is imposing in terms of lost value.  That is not something that is revealed by a DCF analysis. And there are a whole class of value investments like that.
  • One of the great contributions to the theory of this business is Mario Gabelli’s idea that really what you want to look for in this case is a catalyst that will surface the true asset value.
  • You can wait and sometimes that catalyst may be Michael Price or Mario Gabelli if they own enough of the company.  I would like to encourage those investors who are big enough to make that catalyst you.  
AV Equals EPV 
  • The second situation where the AV, the reproduction value of the assets = EPV are essentially the same.
  • That tells a story like any income statement or balance sheet tells a story.  It tells a story of an industry that is in balance.  
  • It is exactly what you would expect to see if there were no barriers-to- entry. 
  • And if you look at this picture and then you analyze the nature of the industry—if you say, for example, this is the rag trade and I know there are no competitive advantages—you now have two good observations on the value of that company. 
  • If it ever were to sell at a market price down here, you know that is what you would be getting. You are getting a bargain from two perspectives: both from AV & EPV so buy it. 

EPV in Excess of AV 
  • We have ignored the growth, but I will talk about it in a second#. The last case is the one we really first talked about. You have got EPV in excess of AV. 
  • The critical issue there is, especially if you are buying the EPV—is that EPV sustainable?
  • That requires an effective analysis of how to think about competitive advantages in the industry.


Introduction to a Value Investing Process by Bruce Greenblatt at the Value Investing Class Columbia Business School 
Edited by John Chew at Aldridge56@aol.com                           
studying/teaching/investing Page 26

 Notes from video lecture by Prof Bruce Greenwald
http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/greenwald-vi-process-foundation_final.pdf



Related topic: #
Look at growth from the perspective of investment required to support the growth. Profitable Growth Occurs Only Within a Franchise.

Two pictures of value: An asset value and an earnings power value.

Mechanically Doing a Valuation 

1.  Doing an asset valuation

Now, doing an asset valuation is just a matter of working down the balance sheet. 
  • As you go through the balance sheet, you ask yourself what it costs to reproduce the various assets.
  • Then for the intangibles list them like the product portfolio and ask what will be the cost reproducing that product portfolio. 
2.  Doing an Earnings power valuation

For the EPV, you basically have to calculate two things:  
  • You have to calculate earnings power which is the current earnings that is adjusted in a variety of ways.
  • You divide the normal earnings by the cost of capital.
There is an assumption in an earnings power value and part of it is being careful about what earnings are.  This is just a picture of what some of those adjustments look like.
  • You have to adjust for any accounting shenanigans that are going on, you have to adjust for the cyclical situation, for the tax situation that may be short-lived, for excess depreciation over the cost of maintenance capital expense (MCX).
  • And really for anything else that is going on that is causing current earnings to deviate from long run sustainable earnings.
  • So valuation is calculated by a company’s long-run sustainable earnings multiplied by 1/cost of capital.  
 
 
What you have got then is two pictures of value: 
 
1. You have got an asset value  (AV)
2. You have got an earnings power value  (EPV)
 
 
And now you are ready to do a serious analysis of value.
 
If the picture looks like case A (AV > EPV), what is going on assuming, you have done the right valuation here? 
  • What it means is say you have $4 billion in assets here that is producing an equivalent earnings power value of $2 billion.
  • What is going there if that is the situation you see? It has got to be bad management. 
  • Management is using those assets in a way that cannot generate a comparable level of distributable earnings.
  • If it is an industry in decline, make sure you haven’t done a reproduction value when you should be doing a liquidation value

Notes from video lecture by Prof Bruce Greenwald